Though you couldn’t tell it from the delighted expressions of the women they’re dancing with, the men at the Christmas office party are real stiffs. Sure, they’re tall, dark and kind of handsome, if your tastes run to buttoned-down, Scotch-scented swagger.

But let’s face it, they’re so much alike they could have rolled off an assembly line. They might as well be made of cardboard. Wait a minute. They are made of cardboard.

It seems fitting, as well as economical, that the male extras in the disarming new stage adaptation of Rona Jaffe’s “Best of Everything” should be giant paper dolls. That’s how guys often looked to the hopeful secretaries in the 1950s Manhattan of Jaffe’s best-selling novel of a half-century ago: flat, unbending, interchangeable and, alas, an essential possession if you wanted to keep up with the other girls.

When I heard that “The Best of Everything” was being made into a work of downtown theater, at Here through Oct. 20, I expected an over-the-top camp fest, replete with female impersonators of all genders. Hadn’t the luscious 1959 movie version featured Joan Crawford as a loveless publishing boss and the mannequin deluxe Suzy Parker as an obsessive, man-stalking actress?

To my surprised pleasure, the 95WordsPerMinute production of “The Best of Everything,” adapted and directed by Julie Kramer, is neither a delirious sendup nor a mordant, finger-wagging deconstruction. It’s a respectful, hysteria-free, streamlined (at 90 minutes) and appealingly modest effort that lets Jaffe’s working girls speak for themselves.

What they have to say isn’t, in some ways, all that different from what the women of “Sex and the City” and even Lena Dunham’s “Girls” would be saying decades later. (In an interview in The New York Times with Ruth La Ferla in 2005, Jaffe described “Best” as “ ‘Sex and the City’ without the vibrators.”)

Photo

From left, Sarah Wilson, Alicia Sable and Amy Wilson in “The Best of Everything,” based on Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Like the more contemporary women of “Sex and the City,” Jaffe’s female characters perceive an unfathomable gender gap dividing them from those perplexing but necessary beings called men. This is true even of her independent-minded heroine, Caroline, who rises quickly from the typing pool at Shalimar Publishing and to whom everyone always seems to be saying, with more astonishment than admiration, “You’re so ambitious.”

Ms. Kramer, who developed her adaptation with Amy Wilson (who also plays the Joan Crawford part here), is working with a mostly female cast, led with brisk expertise and visible intelligence by Sarah Wilson as Caroline. (There are exactly two men, Jordan Geiger and Tom O’Keefe, in the ensemble, and Mr. O’Keefe wittily embodies four separate love interests.)

The cast members are kept on a naturalistic rein that’s relaxed enough to allow for the occasional loopy comic flourish. They wear Daniel Urlie’s confining period costumes as if they put them on every morning. None of them are allowed to condescend to their characters, even when they’re swooning with envy over a best friend’s engagement ring, speculating on a future in a shared double bed or gossiping cattily about interoffice affairs.

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That’s, you know, affffaaairrs. Jaffe’s original novel was notoriously straightforward about sex, from messy foreplay to messier aftermath (including abortions), and its abuses by men in power, which more or less meant all men in those days. The more lurid moments are presented here with neither a wink nor heavy breathing.

A calm lucidity, both amused and a tad sorrowful, prevails in all aspects of the production. Lauren Helpern’s single multiplatform set and Graham Kindred’s lighting suggest the workplace as a sort of sociological laboratory.

There are a few antic touches in addition to the cardboard dancing partners: a toy-size model of an ocean liner to evoke Caroline’s lost love, a couple of musical interludes (including a torchy number performed by Hayley Treider as the obsessive actress) and a sly, inspired dream sequence that involves an exchange of headwear between a man and a woman. There is also, of course, a 1950s soundtrack, in which period vocalists like Jo Stafford and Doris Day sing of love, loss and matrimony.

But this production doesn’t call deliberate attention to these elements. The whole show is refreshingly free of the “aren’t-we-clever” self-consciousness that often accompanies such excursions into pop-culture past.

“The Best of Everything” is part of Here’s Sublet Series, which allows artists to develop and perform work, at a discount. So don’t expect high gloss from this production. The lack of it may in fact be a blessing.

For there is a welcome humility at work here, which in turn creates a feeling of unvarnished transparency. This approach gently and divertingly reminds us that while Jaffe’s popular novel may not have been a major work of art (and she never claimed it was), it focused a clear and abidingly useful gaze on women caught in a moment in time that isn’t as distant as you might suppose.